For most of us, with a decade or more of corporate experience building our careers, this means finding safe, secure, solid investment opportunities. Ask any responsible investment broker, and they’ll probably agree you should:

Build up a well-diversified, worldwide spread stock and bond portfolio at the lowest cost possible ideally, through ETF funds offered through Vanguard, iShares, etc., which for instance replicate the MSCI index

Potentially add a bit of leverage by exposing oneself towards real estate by taking out a mortgage

Build-up a cash position so you can cover 6 months net salary – just in case you find yourself between corporate jobs

Do all this, according to conventional wisdom, and Warren will grade your investment homework with a solid “A” making you feel great during breakfast, while studying the financial section of your local newspaper. Be patient — ride the ups and downs — and you won’t lose money.

But the safe conventional way may not be the best way to grow your wealth. Continue Reading

“Get outside yourself… Our students gain the clarity of focus they need to build transformational organizations that can thrive and seize new market opportunities in today’s fast-paced global economy.”

From my first day at Kellogg when Dean Blount shared this speech with our class, I decided to take this challenge on. Dean Blount’s words resonate with me because they are a personal call to action. I knew that if I was going to meet Dean Blount’s challenge, I was going to need to journey outside of comfort zone.

I decided early in my EMBA experience I wanted to get clarity of focus on how to create and build a great startup. The Kellogg Education Technology Incubator (KETI) competition seemed like a great opportunity to do this. Continue Reading

Israel has more startups per capita than any other country, yet the thriving startup scene, sometimes referred to as Silicone Wadi, has less venture capitalists and angel investors than its American, European and Asian counterparts.

Organic growth has softened. Purchase frequency has slowed. What to do? When pressed to innovate, many corporations have the same knee-jerk reaction: to hire people and spend money. They create cross-functional task-force teams and launch expensive, time-consuming market research studies, generating mounds of data, but to little effect.

Instead of helping a company bring new ideas to market, these efforts at spurring innovation often lead to counterproductive results, distancing the firm from the very group it wants to serve: their buying public. Instead of observing customers first-hand and drawing insights from their behavior, the company’s innovation teams becomes bogged down and bleary-eyed, managing task force meeting calendars and wading through reams of purchase rate propensities and lifetime value projections. Process gets in the way of progress. Company decision-makers find themselves staring at well-constructed PowerPoint decks and Excel models but are no closer to uncovering the searing insights that will translate into highly desired new products and services.

Students in the Venture Design Bootcamp investigate new ideas in a series of hands-on learning exercises.

No matter the stage of your career, it is never too late to launch a new venture, whether it’s a new business, product or even an innovation within your existing organization.

That’s the idea driving Venture Design Bootcamp, a supplemental workshop offered to EMBA students on the Miami and Evanston campuses. Alumnus, entrepreneur and faculty member David Schonthal ’09 (EMP 74) led the first session, held on the Evanston campus on May 11–12, and will repeat the workshop in July in Miami.

Schonthal was recently named one of Crain’s 40 under 40. The serial entrepreneur balances his time between founding MATTER, a health-tech incubator that launched in Chicago this past February, serving as a business designer at IDEO, and acting as director of Kellogg’s Zell Scholars program, a selective venture accelerator program designed to help student-entrepreneurs successfully launch new businesses.

Schonthal shared more about his experience at Kellogg as well as the contents of Venture Design Bootcamp. Continue Reading

Designed in Argentina, printed in 3D in Belgium and produced outside of Chicago, Ill., the Corvi Wine Cooler is not your average chardonnay chiller.

Founder Mario Guagnelli ’15 (EMP 96) knows a good product, and he isn’t afraid to extend his reach far to source the absolute best talent.

A student on the Evanston campus, Guagnelli used his diverse background in IT and manufacturing, passion for Scandinavian design and Kellogg connections to his advantage when starting IntoConcrete. Founded on the concept that products can be beautiful, innovative and sustainable, IntoConcrete brings timeless contemporary concrete designs to market. The Corvi Wine Cooler is just one of many of their concrete-based products to receive critical acclaim from the media and fashion industry.

Madukar Manpuria, co-founder of MyNewCar.in, on his graduation day from the Kellogg-WHU Otto Bersheim Executive MBA Program.

Regardless of industry or career goals, getting an MBA serves up one universal benefit for students: momentum. For Madhukar Manpuria, Jürgen Thom and Christoph Behrendt, the momentum they found from the Kellogg-WHU Otto Beisheim Executive MBA Program encouraged them to finally follow their entrepreneurial aspirations and launch a new business. Continue Reading